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Three Shocking United Stories from the Past Month

United has had some not so good press recently. I think we all remember the story of that passenger that was dragged off a plane last year. Now, in the last month alone, there’s three more United stories that are hard to believe.

Dead Dog

Just this past week a dog was found dead in an overhead luggage bin after a Monday flight from Houston to New York. The Queens girl whose dog died on that United flight, said the heartless flight attendant who forced her mom to put their pet carrier into an overhead bin, later claimed she had no idea the pet was in it.

Shocking that a flight attendant would suggest putting an animal up there, but also surprising that the passengers complied with her request.

United has apologized. “This was a tragic accident that should never have occurred, as pets should never be placed in the overhead bin. We assume full responsibility for this tragedy and express our deepest condolences to the family and are committed to supporting them,” said the airline’s statement. We are thoroughly investigating what occurred to prevent this from ever happening again.”

But apparently this is not such a rare occurrence on United flights. They reported the highest number ofanimal deaths of any U.S. carrier: 18, a rate of 2.24 per 10,000 transported animals. In comparison, American and Delta each reported that two animals died on their planes last year. Those figures refer to animals transported in the cargo hold.

Lost Breast Milk of Military Mom

Last month, Kimberly West, a military mom, was transporting about 400 ounces worth of breast milk in a cooler on board a United flight. She is a mom of three kids under 5 including an 8-month-old, and a member of the U.S. Air Force stationed in Virginia. She’s nursing her baby, and so when she was sent by the military on a two-week deployment exercise in Hawaii, she wanted to keep pumping milk, and bring it home with her.

But when she landed back home, about 75 percent of the milk she’d checked in was missing. When she went to baggage customer service she was told “And what exactly do you want me to do about lost breastmilk?! Who would want to steal THAT?”.

She then asked to talk to a manager who suggested she put in a claim but explained it probably wouldn’t do any good because breast milk is free. Kimberly West explained that her time and energy was not free, but the manager replied “I can’t repay you for your time.”

It seems like the issue hasn’t been resolved yet, the airline admitted that its customer service people’s response at the airport was “unacceptable,” and said it was working with “government agencies” to review all the video footage that might show what had happened to her breast milk.

$1,000 Voucher?

This one is a bit out there. The story was shared on Twitter from Frederick Joseph, marketer, writer and founder of “We Have Stories”. That already makes it a bit too much of a coincidence.

You can check out the whole thread here, but I’ll give you a quick recap. He claims that a woman sitting next to him on a United flight pulled down her tray table and then put both her feet on it. He explains that flight attendants passed by several times and didn’t say anything to the woman. So he took matters into his own hands and asked her to put her feet down because he was eating with her feet just inches away. The woman complains that Frederick Joseph is harassing her. Flight attendant suggest that she moves her feet towards the window, further from him, or put one foot down at least. The woman says “ I want to be accommodated for accommodating him”.

The flight attendant speaks to the person in-charge on the plane and they give promise the woman a $1,000 voucher. There’s also a race issue mentioned as Frederick Joseph is black and the woman is white.

I’ll call BS on this one. A $1,000 voucher sounds extreme for taking your feet of the table and likely flight attendants are not authorized to offer such vouchers at all. I doubt this one will turn out to be true and I haven’t seen a response from United either. Could be that the voucher was offered but not delivered?

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

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Based in NYC. Points/miles enthusiast for years and actively writing about it for the last two years at Danny the Deal Guru. I'm always looking out for deals. Making a few bucks is always nice, but the traveling is by far the best part of this business.

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